The blind eyes opened wide, as if they doubted the sanity of the speaker; then quietly replying, “No, indeed, I wouldn’t,” Alice turned a second time upon her pillow and slept again, while Marian, a good deal piqued at the answer, tormented herself with wondering what the child could mean, and why she disliked Frederic so much. The next morning it was Alice who awoke Marian and said, “Was it a dream, or did you say something to me last night about marrying Frederic?”
For a moment Marian forgot that the sightless eyes turned so inquiringly toward her could not see, and she covered her face with her hands to hide the blushes she knew were burning there.
“Say,” persisted Alice, “what was it?” and half willingly, half reluctantly, Marian told of the strange request which Frederic had made, saying nothing, however, of the letter, for if Colonel Raymond had done her a wrong, she felt it a duty she owed his memory to keep it to herself.
The darkened world in which Alice lived, had matured her other faculties far beyond her age, and though not yet seven years old, she was in many things scarcely less a child than Marian, whose story puzzled her, for she could hardly understand how one who had seemed so much her companion could think of being a married woman. Marian soon convinced her, however, that there was a vast difference between almost seven and almost sixteen, and still she was not reconciled.
“Frederic is well enough,” she said, “and I once heard Agnes Gibson say he was the best match in the county, but somehow he don’t seem to like you. Ain’t he stuck up, and don’t he know a heap more than you?”
“Yes, but I can learn,” answered Marian, sadly, thinking with regret of the many hours she had played in the woods when she might have been practising upon the piano, or reading the books which Frederic liked best. “I can in time make a lady perhaps—and then you know if I don’t have him, one of us must go away, for he said so.”
“Oh,” exclaimed Alice, catching her breath and drawing nearer to Marian, “wouldn’t it be nice for you and me to live here all alone with Dinah, and do just as we’re a mind to. Tell him you won’t, and let him go back where he came from.”
“No,” returned Marian, “if either goes away, it will be me, for I’ve no right here, and Frederic has.”
“You go away,” repeated Alice. “What could you do without Dinah?”
“I don’t know,” returned Marian mournfully, a dim foreboding as it were of her dark future rising up before her. “I can’t sew—I don’t know enough to teach, and I couldn’t do anything but die!”